Hey there people: Don’t be so hard on that Newport Beach law firm that hired five-time financial felon Sharon Logan last year as its office manager despite her resume fraud and criminal background. (Logan’s not there anymore.) Logan has slipped through men’s and employers’ radar many times before.

A Seal Beach police officer, Alex R., dated Logan and let her move in with him and his sons. He ended up having to evict her and get a restraining order in 2012 that lasted until 2021. Despite being a policeman, he had to hire a private investigator to find out about Logan’s felony and theft record.

Meanwhile, a Mission Viejo attorney, Brady Price, loaned Logan thousands of dollars, apparently believing her false claims of being abused by Alex R.

Price eventually came to his senses and sued Logan when she didn’t pay it back. He also publicly claimed she stole from him, although he never prosecuted her for it. Price seemed as shocked as Alex R. to learn of Logan’s extensive criminal history.

A plumbing company, RSM, hired Logan in 2014. She stole from them that same year (as she admitted in her guilty plea). In 2016, Logan was charged with felony grand theft for that, and also from another Orange County plumbing company, Geers. She was allowed to serve her 90-day sentence on weekends only.

In 2010, a Newport shoe store, Sole Comfort, apparently had Logan working as its bookkeeper. (See previous post.) That’s despite Logan then having three felonies for financial crimes, and two misdemeanors, one for ID theft and one for embezzlement. (We don’t know how long Logan spent there or why she left; we’ve reached out to the owner for comment.)

It all illustrates hard it is for private individuals, and businesses, to find criminal background information. California police have access to a statewide criminal database — but that’s just for suspects, not, say, their girlfriends. Alex R. couldn’t use it to check out Sharon Logan.

Yes, there are lots of search service companies who claim to provide all a person’s criminal records. They don’t. Sometimes they have some of them. But there are no court records systems that report to those companies — they have to send people to courthouses to photocopy individual records, like anyone else would have to.

As for the late Brady Price, the Mission Viejo attorney, he would have known how to go county-by-county to each superior court website and do a name search for criminal records. But Price probably didn’t know Logan had spent time in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. That’s where all Logan’s convictions were back then. (Now she’s got the misdemeanor ID theft and two felony thefts in Orange County, too.)

And besides, how many people think to look up their date’s criminal court records? Not many. Maybe more of us should. (Although pretty soon, with Senate Bill 731 automatically sealing most criminal records, there may not be much point in doing that.)

Most people depend on Google. Try searching for Logan now. You’ll get a bunch of Paw Protectors publicity, and various media outlets quoting her about her activism.

You might think a reference and resume check would weed out the Sharon Logans, even without knowing criminal history. The problem is that many employers won’t give negative reviews of former employees for fear of being sued. They’ll only confirm employment dates. That still should have exposed Logan’s resume untruths — except that for one of Logan’s two claimed jobs, the attorney who ran the law firm was dead.

For the second, at Meridian Systems Supply in Orange, our guess is that Logan asked the firm not to contact her current employer, which is a common request.

Now, we know a criminal record is no bar to having a nonprofit. We know that news reporters don’t require a source be a “good person.” We also know that attorneys don’t care if their client is a thief or jerk unless it impacts them or their case.

But when the average person sees Logan having nonprofit status, being represented by public interest attorneys in animal rights lawsuits, and being quoted with respect by reporters, they often assume that these people must have made sure she’s trustworthy, responsible, and respectable. They don’t. It’s not their job.

You’re on your own with that. And Sharon Logan knows it.